Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k(govauctions.app) |
Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k(govauctions.app) |
With $120,000 owed in back taxes due by you upon purchase. Also the structure is derelict and will have to be destroyed before anything can be done with it.
He assumed he would have to put some money into it, but not the millions the fine print said they would need to invest to bring it up to a livable standard - which required a ton of construction, electrical and plumbing as a starter. He kind of scoffed at it once he started learning all of the details.
I also remember seeing the same thing when entire blocks of houses were being sold during the housing crash after 2008. Majority of the houses were in really bad neighborhoods (the ads for houses in Detroit were eye opening) or conversely way TF out in never never land where some developer decided to build some neighborhood development that went belly up after the crash and was stuck with half finished houses and no way to pay to get them finished.
My (now ex) wife was against buying it because we had not bought a home for ourselves yet, and even trying to explain that we could buy it, live in one side, rent the other for the full cost of the mortgage and then some was not enough to convince her, so I let it slide as no amount of money was worth the never-ending argument that it would have caused.
That duplex is worth about $450k now, and if I had gone through with it it would have generated a conservative $200k in rent income in the meantime.
If I had known the relationship would have been over in less than 5 years from that point, I probably would have bought it anyway, but at the time my mentality was "happy wife, happy life", naively thinking that there was a way to make someone happy who refused to be happy.
How does it work in the US? Are taxes on the property itself? This feels weird. I would have thought that the property can only be sold if everything is OK with it (no litigation, liens, etc), and taxes are owed by persons? Is it different over there?
This could vary by jurisdiction, but as I understand it, taxes and liens are attached to the property itself. "Clean title" can be a contingency of offer: buyer can back out and get back their earnest money (aka deposit) if the property has liens/encumbrances that are not written down in the sales contract (example clause at the link at the end). When you buy the place, you get title insurance, often mandated by your mortgage lender. The title insurance company does a title search on the property to find liens and owed money on the property and then sells you an insurance policy saying that they'll make it right if they missed anything during their search. This is because your mortgage lender never wants to be second in line to get their hands on the property to recoup in case you default on your mortgage. Liens on the property should be easy to find because they're supposed to be registered with the local municipality: maybe the city you're in, maybe the county, maybe the state, idk I think it depends. In practice, maybe some roofer/plumber/landscaper forgot to do that and now you have a problem you didn't know you had. That's what the insurance is for. The property _status_ is not knowable so much as the _status transitions_ are knowable: when was a lien attached or removed from the property, so that's why it involves a private company looking it up. You'd think it'd be a public good, but it's not. Odd.
As an example: when I bought my current place, the previous owner was financing the furnace which included free annual service from the installer. He wanted us to take over the payments. We asked him to convey without encumbrances, meaning pay off the balance with the furnace company before we'd close on the house. If he had refused, we could have backed out of the sale because our offer said that we were only willing to buy without owing anyone anything.
Easements can be a huge headache too e.g. some utility may have an easement to come on your property at any time and do a whole list of activities to maintain a pipeline, or power line, or what have you.
There was an episode of Fixer Upper where Chip and Joanna helped their carpenter buy a house for 15K. The neighborhood was dystopian. Presumably people were using the house for shooting practice as its one side was entirely bullet riddled.
It needs to be torn down and rebuilt. It's not a large plot. It doesn't seem to be in an attractive location. For all we know the water is undrinkable. I suspect its true value is negative.
It seems to me that local governments must also have tons of properties to sell or give away. The real issue is that these are in places where people don't usually want to live.
So even as finance save person already in the building, it was impossible to figure out what I'd be getting/owing. Really ruined my taste for these things.
If any debt does need to be tied to the apartment rather than the person, then it simply needs to be registered in a publicly (easily) accessible way. If someone fails to register their debt in a timely manner then it should be forfeit. It should be registered at the time it takes effect. Lender should be responsible for making sure the registration is complete before giving out the debt, if someone takes out a loan then sells it before the debt has been registered that's the lender's problem. They can't retroactively add a lien to my property because the previous owner took a loan when it was their property. That's not reasonable. If the lien is not registered then it doesn't exist, it should be that simple.
I hover the mouse over a dot and a pop-up appears nearby, but when move the mouse away from the dot to click the bubble, the bubble closes.
A few hundred years ago, it was commonplace for the middle- and upper-classes to own large estates, and these estates were expected to be assets that earn money. You would hire staff, and tenant farmers, or have slaves or whatever cadres of workers to work the land, be shepherds, and basically produce revenue for the lords or owners of the estates. This was not only a UK phenomenon but continued in the USA.
Unfortunately, in modern times, there are zoning laws, business licensing, insurance, and many things to militate against homeowners using their homes as businesses or assets or generators of revenue. You can't exactly have a public entrance and signage in a HOA neighborhood and your neighbors gonna be pissed if random stranger-customers are pulling up in their cars all day and walking up to your front door to buy merchandise or to use a service that you offer from your private residence.
But nevertheless, this commercialization happens all the time. I didn't realize how crazy widespread it is until I started paying attention in Google Maps. There are dozens of "cottage industries" in every neighborhood. It's probably exactly the reason why "McMansions" and excessively large homes are popular, even as fertility shrinks and people aren't having kids, they still want room at home for their entrepreneurship and home office, doing whatever business they go into for themselves.
I have seen little family farms that sell "raw milk" and mutton and fresh eggs, basically on the DL for your Venmo or Cashapp payments. Across the valley there is literally an arms dealer who sells out of his garage, and only a few blocks from a school. There are people fighting their HOA, tooth and nail, because the HOA is enforcing their rules about signage, or giveaways, or something, and these people are even featured on the evening news and portrayed as "innocent HOA victim" when in fact, they're trying to illicitly run a business out of their garage and gin-up foot traffic for that business from passers-by in a SFH residential-zoned neighborhood.
So yeah, a home that your family lives in, that's in a residential-zoned area, of the United States, that's guaranteed to have "negative value" because you'll always be pouring money into its taxes, upkeep, and maintenance. And that's exactly why most homeowners decide to actually start a business and use that property, in a grey area, to earn money rather than throwing it all away.
So the blog post contradicts the entire premise of the site.
This is just an ad for their valuation service.
>back taxes
>asbestos
>shit hole places
>something wrong with it
>needs work
>jobs
>demand better of yourself
Love the last one. I'm reminded of an article I read yesterday, where the author complains about how all the affordable housing was built in low income areas! "Oh no! They built the affordable housing where the people who need it are at!! NOOO!"
https://citylimits.org/where-the-most-affordable-apartments-...
check the big "What you need to know before you buy" section.
The prices shown are worthless, you’d have to check what debt any property actually has to determine what you need to put down. That $3k flint house, you will pay $200k+ when all is said and done.
The low prices are nothing more than an interesting hook.
The "It's clickbait" comment at the end made me feel pain for the site buider, and I didn't even put any work into the website. They made a thing and put it out in the world. Some people like it: as evidenced by other comments here.
That they mention the top of the price range instead of the bottom lends a lot of credibility to my mind.
If those things are within a reasonable distance, then so are jobs (well, as about as much as "normal" at least).
All that said, I live in one of the lowest cost of living major metros in the US, and I bought a house in an acceptably decent neighborhood w/ high quality water, electrical, and air, and 5 gigabit symmetric fiber service for under $300k. You don't need to spend millions to find an acceptable place to live when you work remotely, but that doesn't mean you want to live in a HUD foreclosure in some of the worst most blighted neighborhoods in the country where you can't rely on even basic services and are going to be immediately a target of violent crime.
also likely very underdeveloped infra
Isn't this just taking the perspective of the HOA? Mixed use zoning is a completely reasonable policy. The status quo shouldn't be used for normative determinations. At which point you have busybody HOAs lobbying for restrictive residence-only zoning and then harassing sympathetic small business owners who are just trying to make a living.
There's a decent amount of that going on in my neighborhood (Dallas TX). The reason it's on the DL is because nothing is pasteurized let alone inspected by the local health department. Some people prefer raw milk as being more natural but pasteurization was invented for a reason. I stay away from it.
Pasteurization is a very necessary process if any community expects to transport and distribute milk past a radius where a teenage girl could carry a pail, basically. I see nothing wrong with pasteurized milk and I also avoid "raw milk" because it's a red herring of a fad, and those who defiantly purchase and consume raw milk are reckless and ignorant people.
But if you've never sampled cream-top milk, then you've not lived. It is absolutely a revelation. I love opening up a glass bottle of milk from Straus Family Creamery and then using a fork to dislodge the thick cap of cream in the neck of the bottle. You can dredge it all out and then use it in your coffee or tea later. I just enjoy when it melts in my mouth.
Of course, cream-top milk is rather "chunky" and can be unsightly: homogenization was developed partly to mollify housewives and make milk more conveniently pourable from a bottle. In fact, the homogenization processes today remove all the milkfat and then that cream can either be used in creamery products, or the cream can be added back in later to satisfy a target percentage, like 1% or 2% as milk is most commonly sold.
Fat in milk and other foods contributes to the satiety factor: you can eat rice-cakes or soybeans all day and not feel full, until you put some butter or oil on them, and then you feel satisfied. If I drink skim milk then I've got some hydration, but I don't enjoy it. If I drink/chew on a glass of cream-top milk, then I've been transported very near to Cowherds Heaven, and I feel extremely satisfied with the investment.
The USDA and FDA and powers that be told us that milkfat is bad for us because they were commercially motivated to say so. Milkfat is the most lovely part of milk but also the most versatile, and can be used in many nutritious ways, and that's why dairy farmers want rank-and-file consumers to demand less milkfat and drink 1% milk, so that the more lucrative milkfats and cream can be siphoned off for use in more profitable products.
Second, it's weird to throw in an "unfortunately" after pointing out that the only thing that enabled this was exploitative labor practices (including slavery!)
Third, most homeowners do not actually start a business and use their property to earn money.
Fourth, the home doesn't have a negative value. It has a resale value often quite substantial, and you are living in it while you're paying all those maintainence costs.
Maybe the restoration would have been a (or another) point of friction, and perhaps the project would not have gone well because of it. You could have sold for breakeven, or less. Then you (and/or she) would have blamed that as the reason things went south.
Or it could have gone well and you could have lost your share in a divorce.
I don't really have a point ... maybe, bygones and all ...
I find mineral rights interesting. You can own some land, say 20 acres, and then discover something valuable under it like oil but then it turns out the rights to that oil are owned by someone else. Further the owner of those mineral rights can drill on the surface of the land, which you own, without your permission.
Edit: I'm asking how you came up with the $200k+ figure
it's a real stretch to call that clickbait, even starting from the already-stretched definition of clickbait common on HN.
I’ve been remote-only since 2017. In that time I’ve had interruptions in employment three times - it’s not nearly as bleak as this makes it sound.
Your podunk home went up $50k.
HCOL home went up $500k.
Better deal would be to hold the expensive house.
There are plenty of remote first employers. And that's not going to change now.
This is because all lenders require title insurance as a requirement for receiving the loan monies. So for almost all buyers they have no choice, their bank/credit union that is actually putting up most of the money forces it upon them.
Seems to me like this should be the contractor's problem. If they did the job 2 weeks ago fine, but if they come along 6+ months later after the house is sold demanding payment from the new owner that seems ridiculous to me. Surely if these Liens are supposed to be public there needs to be a requirement that they are registered as soon as possible.
Otherwise it seems to me like this is a ripe opportunity for scams. Buy house, have contractors refurbish it, sell it for a much higher value, then the contractors register their debts and now the new buyers or their insurance is on the hook for the refurbishment.
This is called ‘fraud’, it is already illegal.
Mechanic’s liens are good and necessary for customers like the current US President who fail to pay their contractors.
If they try to register their lien once the owner of the vehicle has changed, it can not be accepted. You can't secure debt with a vehicle you no longer own. The lender needs to make sure the person owns the car and register the debt while they still own the car. And if they sell the car then they have money to pay the debt, and since they no longer own the car then their debt is no longer secured so that should trigger a requirement to pay the debt per the loan contract. Debt should be owned by people not objects.
The whole concept of debt that's attached to objects is silly. It can make sense in certain situations like a housing association that's taking up a shared loan and paying it down as part of shared monthly expenses, but for a car repair or similar it makes no sense. The person who takes the debt is responsible for the debt. If they sell the car then they pay the debt with the money from the sale, if the sale doesn't cover the debt then they still owe the rest.
It does not need to be any more complicated than this. In order for anyone to take over responsibility for debt in relation to a purchase, there needs to be explicit written and signed consent. So - I can buy a house including some debt if I know and agree to it, but I can't unwittingly buy a landmine. If the owner fails to resolve their debts when they sell that should be their problem not the buyer's. It's up to the bank to collect their debts from the person they have a contract with.
But in order for housing to be a good investment, it has to have competitive returns with other investments, i.e. it needs to increase by at least as much as GDP per capita. Meanwhile median wages have been increasing slower than GDP per capita, which as above is the long-term cap on housing prices. In other words, housing can't long-term sustainably beat other market investments unless wages do, which they haven't, in which case people would get better returns by putting their money in stocks etc.
Worse, years of ZIRP inflated housing prices beyond any sustainable level even with the scarcity being maintained by existing zoning restrictions, i.e. the "eventually it's not sustainable" point is already in the past.
The result is that in order for housing to be a good investment going forward from now, there would first have to be a major housing crash so that "investors" (i.e. home buyers) could buy low instead of buying high. Which thereby implies that it wouldn't be a good long-term investment at current prices. And by major housing crash, notice what "enormous housing bubble that crashed the world economy" looks like on this chart in 2007 and compare it to what things look like since then, especially since 2020:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
A lot of people haven't realized that the party is over and are expecting housing to still be a good investment.
Mortgages are "heads I win, tails you lose" in non-recourse states like California. You're not down more than your down payment, but the upside is huge, and for the past fifty years it has been more financially advantageous to use that leverage to buy the most expensive home they will allow you to.